GA Minutes – 1pm, Monday 21st November 2011

Our UK-Ireland convention took place over the weekend. Lots of different occupations met up and we’ve started a network. There will be a big press release today issued from all occupations at the same time – a multi-angle press splurge.

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Tent City University:

Manuel Castells, an eminent academic, will be speaking at TCU at midday on Friday.

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Multi-Faith:

Representatives from this group will be speaking at the House of Lords today.

The Bishop of London is supporting us, and St Pauls are having a member of clergy available to talk outside the cathedral with anyone who wants.

Let’s keep working together and moving forward.

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We’re expecting a quiet few days, before the build up to the general strike on November 30th begins on Wednesday.

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Legal:

The corporation of London have published their entire skeleton case against us. They passed the details to our solicitor Karen Todner and our barrister John Cooper QC on Friday, but they didn’t inform us that they published their entire case on the website so we weren’t aware of that for a while.

The Guardian have covered the story today, and they cover all the bad things the Coporation of London talk about, so it doesn’t look great. But don’t worry – take comfort that this story has no press traction at all. We’re discussing with the legal team about how to proceed, everything’s in hand, and things are looking good.

Since we received the action, a phenomenal amount of good work has been done. We’re working on letting the rest of the occupation get involved, and are setting up a Legal Tent behind the library – a private space for private discussions, witness statements, being named etc.

We’re hoping to have a charter document ready top distribute this evening, and hopefully take a decision on this tomorrow at the afternoon GA. This document will give us a legal identity to facilitate the legal process. Thee wording is not that important at this time – it doesn’t define us for the rest of what we’re doing.

Lots of issues ahve been raised in the documentation. Some we can address ourselves – alcohol on site and other issues have been worked on by tranquility. Other issues such as rubbish around tents – please be responsible for the area around your tents – tidy up leaves etc. as this would help with our legal proceedings.

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Process:

We’re continuing to work on streamlining process work, which means 2 things:

1) GA planning. We have daily meetings at 12 noon and 5pm to set the agenda and facilitation people for meetings. Please attend if you would like to help or facilitate.

We also have twice-weekly long-term GA planning meetings, which take place on Monday and Thursday at 2.15pm in the Salvation Army Cafe, which is a nice quiet place to meet. We will use these meetings to slot in the different themes for assemblies over the next few weekd.

Working Groups and individuals with proposal ideas should come to these meetings, or leave a message in the Process pigeonhole in the Info Tent. This system is to stop us organising the content of a GA on the day of the GA itself – stressful.

Please don’t come to daily process meetings and ask us to add things to the GA for that day. Come to the meetings on Mondays and Thursdays.

By this evening we will have set all the different themes for the General Assemblies over the next few days, and we will post them up on the library board.

2) Meeting support. We’re trying to help everyone to do Working Groups, General Assemblies and local organising., by having healthy, cooperative meetings where we can share power and get things done.

Facilitation workshops will be happening all this week between 6pm and 7pm in the Tech Tent. You will learn about the skills, tools and techniques that will help you facilitate – please come along so we can have a large and varied group of facilitators, and not the same old faces all the time.

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Economics:

Some people are asking why we haven’t got a statement together yet? Hopefully we wil be presenting it this evening. The Working Group finalised it on Friday, so subject to the process saying ‘yes’, we will have a statement soon.

The statement is available to read in the Info Tent.

[Reads 6 main headings of drfat statement]

There are probably a lot more points we could make here, but we want to make sure consensus is reached.

To get on the circulation list of this, leave your details in the Economics pocket in the Info Tent. Our next meeting is on Tuesday, downstairs in the Cafe Nero by St Pauls tube.

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SHOUT OUTS

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> Someone were arrested in the tea tent on Saturday night. I wasn’t there. Would anyone like to say something about it if they were there in person?

> I’ve been working in the drugs field for over 20 years. 12 years ago 2 people I work with, who were homeless in Cambridge, were arrested and sentenced to prison. I was called to help free Ruth Weiner and John Brock. We need to say that long term prohibition doesn’t work. The drug wats kill and exploit people. There’s a huge AIDS epidemic amongst injection drug users. That’s all macro-political, but on a day to day basis: I find it bizarre that the police grabbed this man on Saturday for alleged dealing in illegal substances. We are attracteing all sorts of wild and wonderful people. Some are literally dying of diseases related to drug addiction. For police to suddenly, selectively intervene, I daresay they’ve seen something like that happen here before Saturday evening. We were upset to see more people getting angry with the police than are now at this GA. One day I’ll speak over in the tent about this drug policing issues, but if there are any police listening – of course there are drug users here, of course it’s illegal – we don’t promote it. I’m an ex-heroin addict. I lost my husband to AIDS when we were both young. I’m not speaking as a regaulr person on the matter. It’s the 21st century – more people than not know that violence and crime is unnecessary. The amount of blood money in the system is unbelievable. We need to take care of one another.

> The water coolers in the kitchen are for drinking. There was bunch of flowers in one, and a christmas tree in another this morning. They’re being kindly loaned by Aqua-Aid, and are for drinking water, so please take care of them.